Earlier today, Iowa talk radio host and Ted Cruz endorser Steve Deace unloaded on Cruz’s critics in an interview with American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios following the Texas Republican senator’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Deace was particularly angry about Mike Huckabee’s “absolutely heinous” and “despicable” attacks on Cruz’s faith, but he also spent time going after Donald Trump’s supporters, including Sarah Palin and Jerry Falwell Jr., claiming that the two Religious Right leaders overlooked all of Trump’s liberal stances and dirty tactics because of his tough anti-immigration rhetoric.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Deace said of Trump’s prominent backers, alluding to rumors propagated Rep. Steve King, another prominent Iowa endorser of Cruz, that Trump’s more prominent supporters had financial motives to back the business mogul.
“He was essentially betraying us on every single issue,” Deace said of Trump, likening the billionaire to Ahab, the idolatrous king of Israel who was married to Jezebel. “I can’t even begin to tell you how intellectually dishonest Donald Trump was in Iowa the last couple of weeks of this campaign,” he continued. “He did everything but call Ted Cruz an illegal alien. I’ve never seen anything like it … There was nothing Donald Trump would not say, there was nothing Donald Trump would not do.”
Later in the broadcast, Deace compared Trump voters to cult followers who are embracing “nationalism” and “worship of the state” over their Christian faith.
“I have never seen a cult, and I’m including Obama, I have never seen a cult surrounding a candidate in my life like the one around Donald Trump,” he said. “You engage his followers on social media and they don’t want to know any truth and they’re proudly, belligerently ignorant about it. And I want to just say this to our fellow believers on your program this morning: Be wary of nationalism. Nationalism is a pagan philosophy and when it co-opts the church it always leads to tyranny.”
